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Whey, Wine
Boil a pint of new milk in a saucepan, and stir into it two glassfuls of sherry or raisin wine, or less if that will completely turn it. Bring it again to the point of boiling, let it stand a few minutes, remove the curd, pour off the clear whey, and sweeten. If it is for an invalid a little hot water may be added. The curd is indigestible.
A drink from the invalid-cookery tradition: milk deliberately curdled with wine, the solids discarded and the thin sweetened liquid drunk warm. It takes five minutes and depends almost entirely on temperature control.
- The hinge: heat, then wine, then barely boilThe milk must be hot when the wine goes in, and the pan should only just return to a boil afterwards. A hard rolling boil breaks the curd into fine flecks that will not settle, and you end up straining cloudy liquid rather than pouring off clear whey.
- "Two glassfuls"A wine glass in Victorian cookery books is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so two glassfuls is roughly half a cup to a pint of milk. The recipe tells you to use less if less will turn it, which is the honest instruction: add an ounce or two, watch for separation, and stop there.
- New milkFresh whole milk, unskimmed and unboiled beforehand. Modern pasteurised whole milk works; UHT milk, whose proteins are already heavily heat-treated, may not curdle as cleanly.
- Raisin wineA homemade sweet fruit wine common in Victorian larders and effectively gone from shops. A dry-to-medium sherry, madeira or any sweet white wine acidic enough to curdle milk will do the same work.
- Removing the curdLet it stand off the heat for three or four minutes until the curd rises and firms slightly, lift it out with a slotted spoon, then pour the whey through a fine sieve or muslin. The note that the curd is indigestible reflects nineteenth-century sickroom theory rather than fact; it is edible, merely rubbery and flavourless.
- YieldA pint of milk with the wine added gives a generous single serving of whey once the curd is lifted out. Sweeten with a teaspoon or two of sugar or honey while it is still hot and drink it warm.
- AlcoholLittle of the alcohol boils off in the short heating, and what remains stays in the whey rather than the curd. That matters if the intended drinker is a child or someone on medication.
Wine whey belongs to the large body of "invalid cookery" that fills the back pages of Victorian household dictionaries, alongside beef tea, arrowroot gruel and barley water. The logic was dietetic: a patient too weak for solid food could be given something nourishing in liquid form, and whey, being milk stripped of its casein and most of its fat, was thought to be the most easily assimilated part. Whey drinks curdled with wine, ale, lemon juice or rennet appear in English recipe collections from at least the seventeenth century, and the sweet-wine version was still being prescribed for fevers and convalescence when Cassell's was compiled. The direction to thin it with hot water for an invalid, and the aside dismissing the curd, show a book writing for households where the cook was also expected to serve the sickroom on a doctor's instructions.